The Life and Death of a Diamond
by Ivory Novelist
Summary: Lux. My first VS fic. Please read and review. Thanks.


A/N: My first VS fic. Please read and review. Thanks.

Disclaimer: Movie belongs to Sofia Coppola and book belongs to Jeffery Eugenides

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The Life and Death of a Diamond

When Lux climbs to the roof at night, she knows she's starting over. She always showers in the afternoon. This is why. She needs to be clean for somebody new. She needs to make a good impression. Maybe if she's clean, he'll love her. And besides – she's always dirty from the night before.

Her sisters wonder how she gets away with it. How do their parents watch TV in the living room and read the rest of the paper without any idea that their eldest daughter is far above them, fucking like an angel? How does Lux bring herself to do it? Climb the stairs after dinner, prepare herself in front of the mirror, slip out the window and grip at the house like rungs on her ladder to paradise. How does she know so well?

Her sisters could never do it too.

They were too pure – like Cecelia. They could put on makeup on faces the world couldn't see. They could flip through magazines in attempts to live. They could listen to Lux's records and brush their hair. But they couldn't make the trip to the roof tiles.

Tripp. That's all she wanted. She was a magician; she turned every stranger (lover) into Tripp. She couldn't see them in the dark anyway. It was easy to see Tripp's hair, the color of Cecelia's elm. It was easy to pick out the right scent of his breath, feel and hang on until she found the right touch of his fingertips. It was easy to shut her eyes and see that God damn, white smile.

And suddenly, those perfect teeth sent her through the hallways of her house – the ones she hated with every angry word of her music. She passed through those walls with her eyes closed, as somebody new fucked her without caring what her story was.

White. Everything was fucking white. Her skin, her teeth, the pearls her mother wore. The walls, the bathtub, Cecilia's mattress. Even her God damn cigarettes. Her sisters were white, too. White zombies sitting in mirrors and passing through walls. Lux hated white. It was one reason she did this. Maybe if she fucked enough, smoked enough, let the music fill her head, she could stain all the white away. Maybe if she did these things, she would come to life.

Maybe Tripp would love her.

The man didn't need or want someone white, someone pure. He needed a woman. And that's exactly what Lux was, in her mind. It was what she intended to be – a living, mistaken human being. Let her sisters sit inside their white walls and comb their hair. She was going to take back everything her mother had stolen from her.

That was the best part – knowing that this was the last thing her mother would want her to do. Whenever she smiled on the roof, it was because she thought of her mother – watching TV in the living room two floors beneath her, drinking vodka and praising herself for being the victor. But she didn't know about Lux. She didn't know she had already lost, that she was losing every single night. It made Lux smile.

She thought about dying when she lay there, too. She would look away and puff on her cigarette, waiting for that night's bastard to finish, and she would think of dying. She tried to avoid thinking of Cecelia by default. Sometimes she succeeded and other times she failed. She smoked and chose her poison – the car in the garage, like one, big cigarette, finally taking care of the job. That's how it would go. She decided.

She would sit on the roof even after the men left, working on that cigarette and feeling the breeze in her hair and the world thousands of miles away all around her – a colored bubble of air. She tried to breathe. She tried to hear the house speak. She waited for another option, but it never came.

When she laid out the plan to her sisters, they weren't surprised. She wasn't surprised that they weren't. Somehow, they always knew that it was a fantasy in each of their minds. Lux claimed the car, and one right after the other, the rest of the Lisbon girls claimed everything else.

And here she was – Lux Lisbon, real woman, trying to smoke while the car ran. She thought of Tripp Fontaine. She thought of her records. She thought of those nights on the roof. She didn't hear anything from the other side of the door, and she was glad. She wondered which of her sisters was already gone and who was going. She felt her lungs suck in the gas like a drug addict sucks up her fix. She could feel them staining black, and she smiled.

Lux Lisbon was alive. Lux Lisbon won.

And her hand hanging out the window, her unfinished cigarette in those thin fingers, looked exactly like a woman's.


End file.
